John Yaniec helps to stabilize Dorothy M. (Dottie) Metcalf-Lindenburger, educator mission specialist astronaut candidate, during one of a series of reduced gravity sessions. Metcalf-Lindenburger was born in Colorado Springs, but considers Fort Collins her home. (Photo: NASA)

It’s time, nerds. Want to go to space? NASA is looking for a few good women and men for the next astronaut class.

Astronaut Jack Fischer is from Louisville, Colo., home of Sierra Nevada Space Systems. He’s pictured here at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station after the successful splashdown of Orion in Dec. 2014. (Photo: Laura Keeney, The Denver Post)

NASA’s InSight lander will head to Mars in March 2016, and NASA wants your name to be on board.

InSight stands for “Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.” Unlike NASA’s Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, which travel around exploring the surface of Mars, InSight will drill into the planet and use several instruments, such as a seismometer and heat-flow probe, to study the planet’s interior. The mission will give scientists a better understanding of how planets of the inner solar system — including Earth — were formed.

This photo from HiRISE, built by Ball Aerospace in Boulder, shows the crater left by a bolide on the surface of Mars. Scientists estimate the impact took place between 2008 and 2012. (NASA/JPL)

Mars might have had a life-harboring liquid water lake much more recently than scientists previously thought, according to a new finding by researchers at the University of Colorado.

An 18-square-mile chloride salt deposit is thought to have once been a lake bed with water that had only 8 percent the salinity of earth’s oceans, and may have been home to life. The dried up pond — “one of the last instances of a sizable lake on Mars,” according to the study’s lead researcher — was digitally mapped by a team from CU’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, along with researchers from two other universities. The study was published earlier this month in the journal Geology. Read more…

Uwingu was founded by planetary scientist Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder. (Stern is the principal investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission that will do a fly-by of Pluto this summer.)

NASA’s image of the day allows us earthlings to experience our universe through magnificent photography, and some Coloradans are to thank for today’s striking image of a circular depression on the surface of Mars.

The HiRISE is a truly remarkable item that was built at Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., headquartered in Boulder:

HiRISE is the largest telescopic instrument ever sent beyond Earth’s orbit. It is able to image the Martian surface up to five times the resolution provided by the Mars Global Surveyor, identifying images as small as a coffee table.

Centennial State ingenuity, right there.

MRO took off in 2005 with the mission of studying the history of water on Mars to learn if the planet ever supported life. It completed its 40,000th orbit around Mars on Feb. 7, 2015. The HiRISE camera’s resolution can help identify possible layers that would give evidence of deposits left in place by moving water.

It’s strange to think that a man who went to the moon and wants to colonize Mars could be delayed by some snow.

But Buzz Aldrin did get stuck in snow — or the traffic it caused, anyway — and was about 30 minutes late to his talk on “unified space vision” in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Macky Auditorium Tuesday evening. But the second person to step foot on the moon is allowed to be a little late, and the Apollo 11 mission footage set to dramatic music that was playing for the crowd was a reminder of that. It was about the best introduction anyone can get … not to mention a good way prepare the crowd for his proposal.

Aldrin was in Boulder to talk about doing the impossible. He used the “impossible” word again and again, explaining how he, his fellow astronauts, NASA and the United States had done the impossible by putting mankind on the moon, and how he believed it was vital that we again “do the impossible” and colonize Mars. Read more…

Comments Off on Buzz Aldrin wants to do the impossible again, and colonize Mars

The Curiosity Mars Rover captured the public’s imagination when it landed on the red planet Aug. 6, 2012, and a new short film from a pair of Colorado-bred creatives celebrates the science and inspiration behind its accomplishments.

“Our Curiosity,” a video tribute to NASA’s most popular Mars Science Laboratory project, has racked up more than 57,000 views on YouTube since it was posted Aug. 7.

Timed to coincide with the two-year anniversary of the Curiosity landing, the video is the work of Cherry Creek High School grads Austin Wintory, a Grammy-nominated, Los Angeles-based composer, and Jeff Marlow, an astrobiologist and Wired magazine writer who officially blogged about Curiosity for NASA.

“We wanted to evangelize for the fact that this is really quite cutting-edge science but also very tangible and understandable,” Wintory said.